


Echoes of the Past

by threewalls



Series: Schirra [62]
Category: Final Fantasy XII
Genre: 710 OV, Angst, Background Polyamory, Claustrophobia, Collars, F/M, Grief, M/M, Nam Yensa, Ogir Yensa, Post-Game(s), Shiva - Freeform, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-05-25
Updated: 2008-05-25
Packaged: 2017-10-14 21:11:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,459
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/153497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/threewalls/pseuds/threewalls
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><cite>This may be a fool’s errand, but it does not sit well with Basch to have left a comrade behind.</cite></p><p>Post-Game Spoilers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Echoes of the Past

**Author's Note:**

> Written with thanks to lynndyre for beta.

The sun is as hot as Basch remembers, though long years in full plate have prepared him better than the two below ground. He could not have marched this distance back then without the aid of comrades, but now the Urutan fall quickly enough under his lone axe. This may be a fool’s errand, but it does not sit well with Basch to have left a comrade behind.

He loses the larger part of several days retracing his steps. It is not that the Ogir-Yensa lacks for landmarks, but that they all look so much alike. What was solid sand in his memory has shifted with time and unknown tides to become treacherous sea. Twice, Basch finds the refinery platform before him broken beyond all passage. And yet, he reaches the crash site just over a week after touching the Tchita crystal and stepping back onto golden sand.

Four years since the succession, since the wars, judges magister are once more encouraged occasional, personal leave from their duties. In this new leisure, Basch has read the slim, classified Ministry dossier concerning the wartime destruction of the Imperial Army's 8th fleet. It contains the testimony taken from the survivors, the surveyors that accompanied the salvage mission, the machinists who performed the fleet's final tuning in Rabanastre. His brother's conclusion was that the explosion on the flagship Leviathan, in destroying its prototype manufacted skystone, damned the fleet to the usual fate of vessels in Jagd. Shiva crashed bow first, systems damaged, but until that point still structurally sound for flight in the jagd-free skies of Dalmasca less than an hour distant. Contemporary circumstances required that the salvage operation be restricted to proprietary technology and personnel. No non-Archadians were numbered among the survivors taken via Rabanastre to Archades. There had not been time to individually identify those who had fallen in the crash, left to rot where they died.

Basch enters Shiva on the upper starboard deck, and works his way down and towards the stern. The salvage crew cut two entrances, and found three others, but this is only one that remains exposed. The sand had not swallowed Shiva on impact, as it had many of the fleet, but the desert would have it in time. The sand, the salt, had begun to eat away at the entrance, corroding the iron into deep red rust. The internal corridors show none of this, but Basch knows that Archadians build the hulls of their vessels thin for speed. He takes his steps slowly, placing his feet with care.

Basch has not gone far when he realises that something else is wrong. Corpses, even those so long dead, carry a scent he could never forget. The ship smells as clean and dry as the desert.

There is no lighting inside, no remaining power. Though they stand in darkness, the hallways within are more oppressively hot than outside. Glowing fire magicite strung around his neck, Basch traces his path with his hand against the bulkhead. He stops at every corner or junction to consult the map he carefully compiled from the reports. The salvage crews' brief stressed thoroughness as well as speed. They recorded which bulkheads they found open, which they broke, and Basch has plotted the route they would have taken to reach the stern docking bay.

Something cracks under his weight, but the floor is solid. Basch drops to a crouch, hand stretched out to direct the magicite towards the floor, and what he sees makes his gorge rise. He is no stranger to the sight of battlefield carrion, corpses picked apart by animal but this-- no animal would gather up their scraps and arrange them neatly in a pile. He has not stepped upon a corpse, but a midden heap that was once a man. No one should die like this.

Basch hears a noise from the warm darkness, straightens, raises his axe and shield to height. A scraping sound, something without sandals. A single creature, who chitters as it rounds the invisible corner ahead.

The Urutan dies too quickly.

Basch moves with greater speed through the ship, still testing his footing with every second step, but no longer the map, its lines branded on his mind. He meets other Urutan, who he also slays, though not many, and like the first, they are weak, disoriented. His speed is making him sweat, which prickles and then trickles down his neck, his thighs.

The sunlight blinds him.

The docking bay has no ceiling-- _struck by a band of intensely high heat at the level of her--_ there is only one pile in the room, remnants enough for three, or even four, men stacked high against the wall through which Basch entered.

He charges forward-- kicks, scattering fragments of dark steel, and bleached bone. He falls to his knees, digs and sifts, his hopes flooding up his throat to choke him in waves. There will be no whole bodies here.

There are no whole pieces, no helmets, no breastplates, nothing but anonymous pieces of metal that pass through his hands too quickly to identify. A jagged edge catches, pulls, cuts along his arm, the bright scent of blood and the brighter ozone scent of magical healing, but Basch has seen something of colour in all the black. He fears a hallucination, the heat, but no, it is faded red leather he holds in his hands, a flange of green fabric and even the iron buckle, still fastened. Basch presses it to his lips.

Landians measure a man's life in sevens, but Dalmascans in sixes. Vossler's thirty-sixth birthday marked him a man at the height of his strength, and a suit of armour, brigandine surcoat, vambraces and greaves was more than a friend might have gifted him, but not inappropriate. It hadn't been a surprise in the end, not after taking Vossler to half a dozen appointments, for measurements and fittings, the blacksmith and the tanner. But Vossler had looked something like surprised when Basch had first helped him settle the plates across his broad chest, first slipped the tag of the collar home into the buckle, the buckle Basch now holds. He places the scrap secure in his wallet; there is only one thing left for him to do.

Basch rises, swaying, the docking bay shimmering before his eyes in a desert heat haze. He re-gathers the fragments into the centre of the floor, not as a midden, but a pyre. He looks for Nightmare as he works, for the blade's thickness, its length, would mark even its shattered pieces apart from Imperial weaponcraft, but there is not one weapon shard amongst them, no shattered shields, only armour, bones cracked hollow and shredded leather. The Urutan were thorough scavengers.

Basch stands where he watched Vossler fall. He casts magical oil over the pyre, and then the strongest Fire spell he knows, three times over. Watching the flames burn, he tears the fire magicite from his neck, and throws. Basch's vision goes white--

Then, black--

Then, the thin blue of a cloudless sky. Basch wakes on his back to a grating sound, like metal on stone, the pyre before him a smouldering pile of slag. The floor is trembling, shaking, dropping away.

Basch runs.

\---

Basch stands on the rig until the Sandsea is placid, no sign remaining whether Shiva fell to his left or his right. He does not look for landmarks, but strikes west along the gangway. If he must retrace his steps, there are always more Urutan to slay.

At the junction of the Ogir- and Nam-Yensa, there stands the teleport crystal that will take him to the company of friends waiting in Balfonheim, to his alibi for these two weeks' scheduled absence, to the blankness that comes from a bottle. A wake, but he won't call it that, not even in front of friends who will steady him when he tries to walk, hold him, and always be sound asleep when Basch's eyes burn for lack of tears: Fran, who will ride him until he cannot think, and Balthier, who will ply him with potions when the noon-light conquers their hotel room's curtains. When almost all his vacation is spent, they will fly him back to Archades faster than any mere commercial vessel.

In his suite, Basch will find a small box in his locked chest of personal effects, and place the severed red leather collar he found on Shiva over another, a brown cut from a red Bhujerban vest Basch received in his thirty-sixth year. He will put the box away.

Judge Magister Gabranth will call Carryl to brief him on the state of the city, Hausen for the affairs of the palace, and Lynott to assist him with his armour.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Son of Dalmasca](https://archiveofourown.org/works/159771) by [lynndyre](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lynndyre/pseuds/lynndyre), [threewalls](https://archiveofourown.org/users/threewalls/pseuds/threewalls)




End file.
